Downtown Parking: Supply is Up, Demand is Down.

The Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) has released the results of their most recent parking inventory for the region (Excel file with methodology here). The numbers for Downtown tell a particularly important story, one that will need to be repeated over and over in the coming years.

In short, don’t let anyone tell you, ever, that Downtown doesn’t have enough parking. There are now over 78,000 parking stalls in Downtown Seattle (using the broader ‘Center City’ definition of downtown). Over 4,000 new stalls have been built since 2010.

Yet even with the significant job and housing growth seen in the last 3 years, 2,000-3,000 fewer cars per day are parking Downtown than in 2010. Commute Seattle reported earlier this year that drive-alone commuting is at a record low of 34%. Overall downtown parking occupancy rates range from 50-70%, far lower than the 80+% the city aims for in on street parking. Though our building codes mandate ever more parking (with limited exceptions), supply exceeds demand, and this imbalance is slowly accelerating thanks to overbuilding.

Much more below the fold.

So when we inevitably hear that fully implementing the Bicycle Master Plan downtown will take away too much parking, perhaps a few hundred spaces, we need to be able to leverage the fact that there are 30,000 currently unused spaces elsewhere Downtown. We can make Downtown safe for bikes without damaging vehicle access.

In summary, we have a huge surplus of parking. We can give lanes to streetcars and bikes and buses and still have a huge surplus. If there’s a perception of a parking scarcity, or off-street parking is perceived as overly expensive and/or confusing to navigate, those are all problems that call for better marketing, utilization, and education, not wasting valuable urban land on unneeded supply.

This is great data that makes our case for more human-centered uses of the public Right of Way. Once this last generation of mega garages gets built (Amazon and Hedreen et al), maybe we can finally stop building more parking and instead build more of the amenities that make Downtown accessible, usable, and enjoyable for all. Can you imagine what the impacts to affordability might be if every project didn’t start by digging a 6-story hole in the ground?

42 Replies to “Downtown Parking: Supply is Up, Demand is Down.”

The only thing is, the city doesn’t see paid street parking spaces as a negative. They see them as miniature money printing presses, giving the city almost $5000 per space per year in fines and revenue.

So Sam, since you are benevolent and rich as well as wise, could you please drive downtown frequently and park so that we’ll have more money to save Metro with? If you get bored spending all day downtown, you can try the Link Excuses of the Week or take a bus to another neighborhood, and come back to your car when you’re done.

I can understand why some may want those street spaces to be repurposed, but do they have a plan on how to replace the revenue they produce?

Per the linked discussion, the exclusive ROW option, which costs 47 more parking spots than the mixed use option, is estimated to cost 2 million dollars less per year to operate. That’s a lot more revenue than those 47 parking spots are going to generate.

What problem is the Center City Connector an answer to again? North/South downtown travel? Don’t we already have that now in the form of hundreds of buses that travel up and down 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Aves, and the DSTT? Rail fetishists cry “duplication of service!” if there’s a bus route with a half mile of “precious,” and demand that they be eliminated. But if it’s a rail line duplicating bus routes, they declare that it’s not duplicating anything, it’s offering an improved mode of transportation.

It is duplicative. It will be great for tourists, but not all that useful for locals. For tourists, it will immediately be the legible way of traveling between Pioneer Square, the Market, and the retail core, particularly if the city wises up and uses Pine Street. The DSTT is not at all intuitive for those in the Market or Pioneer Square; in Pioneer Square, you have to walk through a couple of very seedy blocks to access it.

My feeling on it is that it would be a nice thing to have once a real transit infrastructure is built, but that for now the money should somehow be thrown into the BUILD ALL THE TUNNELS pot. (Easier said than done given that this is a city project and ST is the BUILD ALL THE TUNNELS agency.)

It’s also an accessibility upgrade. Let’s say that you want to get from Pine to James, and you have two kids in a stroller, or a bunch of luggage. It’s a schlep to get down to the DSTT, and there won’t be any room for you on a bus. A streetcar, with wide aisles and level boarding, will be a huge help.

And yet the number of Seattle households with no cars, 16%, has remained the same for the past decade. You’d think that, if cars were being abandoned, the percentage of households in Seattle with cars would’ve changed. Michael McGinn, Seattle’s worst mayor ever, tried to lie about that issue a couple years ago, but it turned out that the same percentage — 16% — of households was without a car in 2010 as in 2000.
And then there’s Seattle’s bike commuter projections, which once called for 9% of the commuters to be commuting via bicycle by now. Alas, it’s unchanged at 3%.

Cars aren’t being abandoned, but they are being parked downtown less frequently. One thing our transit system does pretty well is getting people downtown. With parking rates and traffic being what they are, it’s hardly surprising that a significant fraction of people traveling downtown would do so via public transit.

One thing our transit system doesn’t do very well is supporting trips that neither start nor end downtown. Since most people need to take such trips fairly often, they aren’t willing to get rid of their cars.

The number of cars people have is a stupid measurement of the driving people do, and really off topic.

I have two cars. I hardly ever park downtown. I just take the bus. The only time I drive downtown is when my wife is with me, and doesn’t want to take the bus. This is usually when there is something going on in the evening. By the way, I find it pretty easy to find parking in those instances. But in general, driving downtown is usually pretty silly — if it was just up to me, I would never drive downtown. But I’m not getting rid of my cars, either. I use them to go to the mountains. It will be a long time before we solve that problem and get good public transportation to the trail heads.

The aggregate number of owned cars matters a great deal when you are talking about residential parking. For downtown parking, though, as long as people continue to leave their cars at home, it’s mostly irrelevant.

Actually cycling is up to 4.1%. 4.1% isn’t a lot, but it’s a significant increase over 3%. This makes me question your numbers about car ownership too. I wouldn’t be surprised if around 16% of homes are still carless. However, I would not be surprised if the percentage of houses that went from 2 to 1 or 3 to 2 cars increased a lot. Also people are driving their cars less and that’s a fact.

The 3.3% figure for bike commuting is for Downtown commutes only, which is up 18% from the 2.8% bike commute rate in the 2010 survey. Multiplied across the estimated 202,000 Downtown employees, there were approximately 5,600 Downtown bike commuters in 2010, and 6,600 in 2012. Yet rounding has caused this growth to be reported as “unchanged since 2010 at 3%”, which is inaccurate.

I was poking around the 2010 census a few weeks ago and checked this; it is accurate. the percentage of car free households is identical from 2000 to 2010. Note that doesn’t tell us that the number of cars per capita isn’t declining–it could well be that more households have fewer cars–but I don’t think the census data tells us that. (I could be mistaken, though).

As the other commentators noted, you are way off in many regards. My gf and I own a car that we use on the weekends to get to the mountains. We bike and bus everywhere around the city and for our daily commutes. Moreover, Seattle is one of the richest cities in the nation. With all of the outdoor options beyond the city limits that are inaccessible by public transit, why wouldn’t someone own a car when you can easily afford it? And bike ridership is way up and it’s the fastest growing mode of transportation by far. 4.1% might not seem significant but it’s one of the highest in the country and will only expand as we add more infrastructure.

We need to get to the point where trips in a car that don’t involve owning the car get easier and cheaper. With Zipcar, Car2Go, Lyft, etc., we’ve come along way, but there’s a long way to go in that area. When you can get a ride or rent a car somewhere that the bus doesn’t go for not much more than the cost of gas, that’s when the overall demand for car ownership will start to plummet.

Seattle’s downtown zoning requires no parking for new uses, and in fact has a parking maximum of 1 space per 1,000 sf for office uses. Seattle (DPD) has also eliminated parking requirements for most new uses in urban villages, urban centers and transit station areas.

Overbuilding of parking may still be a problem, but it’s being done because of decisions of private owner/developers, not parking mandates.

One interesting dynamic in the argument that on-street spaces are not necessary due to the surplus in off-street spaces is Car2Go. As a Car2Go member, off-street spaces are currently useless to me, and only on-street spaces matter (and even then, only the subset of on-street parking spaces that allows parking during rush hour).

That being said, I strongly support the idea of converting on-street parking downtown into space for bikes and transit. This would presumably force Car2Go to lease some off-street spaces, and probably, drive up prices, but it’s still worth it. If Car2Go turns to the private sector for downtown parking, the amount of money it pays the city for user of metered parking should decrease.

Obviously demand is way down, since rates are way way up. The question is always – how to distinguish between the short term parking that provides access to retail, meetings and tourists downtown, vs. the commuters we think of parking in those spots. I’ve always felt that the commuter parking issue is driven in part by the fact that someone other than the commuter is providing the parking space as an employee perk, and those commuters are then totally price-insensitive. But obviously higher long-term parking is one of the bigger drivers of transit use for those of us not living in the economic stratosphere, and that’s a good thing.

I think the challenge is in differentiating that problem from the need to make downtown accessible for all of its non-commuting challenges. Retail is key to making downtown a 24-hour destination, and tourism is part of its identity and economic health. It concerns me a little to see blanket statements about parking that don’t make that distinction.

Matthew makes the best case I’ve read to date for why street parking is a luxury to a few at the expense of the many. The numbers and facts are irrefutable.
Not only do parked cars along busy arterials take up a valuable travel lane, but there impact to adjoining lane(s), degrades the functionality of those lanes by quite a bit. Why on earth would buses ‘split the lanes’ along Rainier if traveling within a couple of feet of parked cars was routinely safe? No, it is dangerous, not knowing when the next door will pop open in your face, so the smart drivers turn two travel lanes into one.
Cyclist getting face planted on a swinging door is even worse. Tinted glass all around these days eliminates being able to see if anyone is in the car.
Waiting on someone to practice their parallel parking skills is just more time wasted on the many by the few.
If shop owners are so dependent on a couple of public parking spaces in front of their business, then they should shoulder that burden and purchase several hundred square feet of off street parking. Supply will meet that demand – but as Matthew has pointed out, the supply is there in spades.
Good Research and great writing.

Great post. Pretty hard to justify building more parking when supply outstrips demand by 2x.

In most of the downtown core, minimum requirements are not the issue: Builders and lenders who us out-of-date models to determine how much parking to build are. The way Seattle can fight that is by lowering the parking maximums per unit/office sq feet.

I’ve heard the pro-parking crowd claim that parking is a fungible resource (people can always rent out their spaces if they don’t need them!). If so, the argument could be made (easily) that there is enough supply already for A LOT of unparked residential in the downtown core. We just need to find the developers and lenders who are willing to take the leap.

Seattle now has no maximum density (of housing) requirements in almost all of it’s zones (including lowrise multi-family zones in urban villages, centers, and station areas). In fact Seattle now has minimum density requirements in certain areas thanks to Richard Conlin.

Seattle also has no required parking minimums in most of it’s zones, including all of downtown, and urban centers, urban villages, and station areas. In fact, in downtown and a few other areas there is a parking maximum.

Seattle’s land use rules should be getting way more credit for being extremely progressive on parking policy – and should not be getting bashed on here.

I’m talking about the past 70 years of development. Seattle has had zoning since the World War II era, and it’s only very recently that the progressivism that Frank describes has started to take hold. While Sim City is a fun game, in real life, zoning changes do not instantly lead to land use changes. Seattle’s current urban form owes a lot to the urban-hostile rules that we had during most of our boom years.

the PSRC has been collecting and publicizing the parking data for a long time. See: http://www.psrc.org/data/transportation/parking-inventory/
the deep bore and First Hill Streetcar projects also led to the loss of hundreds of parallel parking stalls. note that the piece shows overall data for a wide area. micro markets may be parked out. it depends on how well they are priced. parking prices have risen faster than inflation. driving in congested traffic is hassle. the AWV and the Mercer West projects have led to increased congestion as both the approaches to the core have been constrained. SR-520 tolling has made that approach more costly and some alternative approaches more congested with traffic diversion.

You could also make the argument that there is pent-up demand for living in single-family mansionettes in Capitol Hill (and there is), but does that demand trump the pent-up demand for many more people to live there in an apartment, if that is what is available?

Matt… I have no idea what you are talking about. I’m able to park in Capitol Hill during mega peak times without a problem, ever – just go to a pay garage or lot. Are you expecting there to be street parking?